Like a lot of raids we’ve been having issues with attendance lately. We have our core raiders: Reversion and Logarithm as tanks. Me and Kerick as heals. Cyla’s enhance shaman. Grom’s ret pally. Ado’s hunter, Falahla’s mage. It’s a really really solid core and I love it.
Problem is, Log has Army duty once a month or so and is a college student so occasionally he can’t make it. Everyone else has RL issues too, just not seemingly as frequently as Log. I’ve brought in a third healer twice now, tried to make them a permanent member of the heals team, only to have their schedules change. One’s hip-deep in wedding plans and trying to get a raid of her own going in a time that works better for her. The other is apparently taking a break from WoW. All understandable but when it comes on top of losing my original third healer to job issues a few months back, the healing team has just felt weak.
And when Log’s away, I have to find another tank. I can bring someone in but our guild is really lacking in tanks right now. Or I can have Grom go tank and bring in another dps – which works really well – but this Friday neither Grom nor Log could tank so that meant I asked Repgrind to bring in her DK Kalyon. So now I had to find TWO healers.
Fortunately this week both Jhudora and her sister could help heal, with the exceptions of Halfus and Magmaw. Jhudora offered an alt to help get past those two guys and since we can one tank Magmaw I made Rep switch back to Kerick, help down the boss, and then we brought Kalyon back in.
Side note – Jhudora’s sister Annaliese is a super pro disc priest. She’s rocking all blues and killing me and Kerick with raw HPS numbers. Her mana’s weak, sure, so I glyphed my Innervate and gave it away all night which worked well. But she inspired me to go back and look at my gear this Sunday and I reforged into a lot of haste; I really hadn’t reforged since upgrading most of my gear and I had a lot of useless crit and mastery to turn into yummy haste.
Still, I don’t like the situation we’re in. As a druid and a paladin pair, we can use almost any third healing class we get. But finding someone who can make our schedule is hard. I’m not sure what we’re going to do. Saturday night neither Jhudora nor her sister could help out so I asked around in guild until I finally found someone who could heal. Brought him in and while he did fine, he didn’t know the fights and wasn’t picking up on them that well. We got a total of 7 bosses down this weekend, which was a disappointment.
Hopefully we can get some really solid attempts in the next few weeks. Although I may refuse to do Chimaeron. I totally hate that fight in every way.
Slice … level a healer! :P
I need to do some research on Chim or something. I have no idea what was happening. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve really only healed it once since I keep having to tank. But I was using my fastest heal and still losing tanks. Although that last attempt when we switched assignments around did seem promising.
I’m hoping the haste will help – can’t tell you how many times people died because my heal hit a half second late.
Who is tank healing on that fight and who is raid healing?
What strat are you using and where is everyone standing?
Ihatethatfightsomuch.
We have not had a consistent set of the same healers every week for weeks now. Early March. Which makes finding a strategy terrible. This week we were approaching a strategy of paladin heal tanks, Druid heal group 2 (no tanks) holy priest heal Group 1 (with tanks in it). That was starting to work but…. the priest we had Saturday wasn’t used to the fight at all and people kept dying.
Ihateitsomuch. Rev and I keep having arguments because I sit there and come up with new strats on the fly with the healers and he can’t see what we’re doing so has no idea that we’re trying new things not just the same thing that hurt us before.
We need to hit that fight early, instead of later in the raid when people are losing focus. I know I was slacking some by that time, and can think of a couple of things now that I didn’t think to try then, just because I was worn out and grumpy by that point anyway.
The way we do it is have our druid tank heal with Slice healing one group and Sorak healing the other one.
Each feud they rotate cooldowns.
It might help having you on the tanks (if you are comfortable with it) and have Rep raid heal a group.
Do you guys have someone calling out when to move to stack and when to separate?
Yeah we do pretty well at stacking, and moving; the feud phases are not killing us. The Massacres are. I’m willing to tank heal but sometimes it seems like my hots are the only thing that will get people in time.
I dunno. I can hit a couple people with Flash of Light in no time. But I can’t keep the tanks up. Maybe we’re doing it wrong, being stuck in the old “Paladins are tank healers” mindset. Or maybe I just need to use more cooldowns. I don’t know. I’d certainly be up for trying a group instead of the tanks though.
having to bring in a new healer for that fight makes it painful indeed. The shock factor of seeing LOW health most of the time is stress inducing and rough on a new healer. (Sorak still is shocked everytime, for some reason)
Usually assigned to group 1
Me
tank
DPS
DPS
DPS
Sorak with group 2
Sorak
Zarm (druid)
tank
DPS
DPS
Spliting it up this way seems to make it easier for both healers healing groups.
It does require a little discipline as you have to stick to your group no matter what.
I am disc, so what I do is when a slime hits people in my group I will binding heal them, it heals for the needed 10k and also heals me even if I may not need it.
For Massacre, PoH (glyphed) time it to hit right after the massacre. If some is still needed, another PoH or even a Holy Nova is usually all that is needed.
Feud 1
When stacked, we use Zarm’s Tranq, with usually x2 Healing Rain, Holy radience (pally tank), and Power Word: Awesome.
Feud 2
Divine Hymn, Tree of Life, x2 healing rain, Holy raidiance (pally tank).
Feud 3
health cookies, x2 healing rain, holy radiance, Power Word: awesome
And I think a lot of the DPS have bandages?
I do not know what Zarm uses as a rotation for his healing though, it boggles me as to how he never has mana issues.
This is an older parse for a few weeks ago.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/c3sns681fq3s6pr8/sum/healingDone/?s=11255&e=11620
I think he just rolls constant LB on the current tank?
Resto Shaman’s I have no idea how they play.
I know I will heal my group and the current tank with a penance or two for the grace buff, and bubble them for the mana regen.
I with I had lvled a Hybrid class instead of a pure class ><
What strat do your tanks use on the breaks and double attacks?
I have seen it done two ways. One is having one tank get all the breaks (and hold the boss) while the other eats every double attack and nothing else. This way works and is easy to set up but requires both tanks to be kept more or less full the whole time.
The other way is to have the tanks trade at 3 stacks. This works also but is harder with healers and tanks that are less familiar with each other. This strat means only one tank has to be full at a time but the other tank needs to be filled up right before the swap or they die. So this way lightens the total healing load but requires them to be more responsive with the swaps.
We tried the 1st one for our 1st intial attempts, but as much as I hate to admit it, we tend to brute force a lot of our healing.
So we are using the 2nd method. And you are correct, it does require your healers to be more familiar with one another. But it does cut down on the stress on tank healer as they only really have to keep one tank topped off.
With the 2nd method, the tank who is about to take the boss, will call it out and all healers if poss help to top off fast. Tanks need to call out when they grab it or about to grab it pref. Or one tank who knows the timers and can grab as needed.
Also on the initial grab the 1st tank will use a cooldown to prevent the occasional insta kill. Also when grabbing the boss when the other tank gets 3 stacks of break, our tanks will use a cooldown as needed.
But yeah communication is key.
Sorak will swap his ES form tank to tank, Zarm our druid will swap LBs I assume. And I will bubble, popping Pain Suppression when needed. I found using PS early in the fight will allow it to be up when Chim transitions to the unhealable portion, and will help keep a tank up longer.
See, I find the 3 stack method much easier to understand as a tank. As a healer though … it’s much more confusing to me and I really didn’t adjust to it very well the other night. Then again, we honestly have spent very little time on this fight *with me as a healer* … I need more pulls on it to really get my head around it I guess.
Oh yeah. I dont trust the % all the time for people’s life, so I will heal someone to 11-or more just to be sure. Although at this time I am sure Zarm or Sorak are also crosshealing.
I am sorry I was born this weekend and my celebrations will take away some of your core raiders. :(
I would be mad were it not for your extreme good taste in choosing a time of year for a birthday. Unfortunately you were not far sighted enough to arrange that it fall on a non raid night, the way I have arranged my own.
On the tanking strategy: If you have one tank keeping the boss and getting all stacks of break an the other tank eating double attack, only the double attack tank has to be on full health. As long as you are above 10k, Chimaeron needs two melee hits to kill you – which means a time window of almost five seconds to get the tank back to 10k, and that it does not matter if he takes 15k or 300k from each melee hit. Effectivly, the main tank could be a dps dk or ret paladin in their respective defensive stance.
On healing the fight, and your attendance problems: http://www.wowhead.com/spell=77226 <3! And I think there are other effects that work in this direction.
Hmmm. I never thought about it that way before, True if you were to have a “tank” take all the double attacks, and the pseudo tank just take breaks, you really could have a plate DPS.
Hmm… Yeah, that would require good timing but that could be done. And if you miss a break or two it would not kill the main tank. If a pally did it could they bubble out of the debuff? Never have tried that. One could bubble out of 4 stacks and still have time to clear the forbear before needing to clear stacks again. hmm….
For any tank or pseudo tank not taking double attacks (read, the main tank when having a dedicated double attack soaker), break is a very slight defensive loss – you won’t get one shotted anyway, and it lowers only healing done, not taken. And as I just read on wowhead, you can’t BoP it off… but then again, it should be a non-issue for normal mode. Heroic mode is an entirely different story, I’m honestly not sure what he does while feud besides autoattacking.
Actually he does not auto attack durring Feud. He just does the poison splash thing. The same one we spread out for the rest of the time that hits two targets. Does he auto attack with feud in heroic mode?
Yes, I’m just not sure if he is buffing himself with double attack and/or break is proccing.
And once again, I should thank you all for making me think about different ways to do encounters we have killed many times. Don’t get why Zele isn’t tanking him as ret :O
Druid healing Chimmy can be a lot easier if you swap (temporarily) into the regrowth glyph. (only time I know that it’s actually a good choice). Since 80% of the raid will be under 50% the whole fight it’ll auto refresh indefinitely.